Four Fools in the Age of Reason: Laughter, Cruelty, and Power in Early Modern Germany

By Dorinda Outram

Unveiling the nearly lost world of the court fools of eighteenth-century Germany, Dorinda Outram shows that laughter was an essential instrument of power. Whether jovial or cruel, mirth altered social and political relations.

Outram takes us first to the court of Frederick William I of Prussia, who emerges not only as an administrative reformer and notorious militarist but also as a "master of fools," a ruler who used fools to prop up his uncertain power. The autobiography of the itinerant fool Peter Prosch affords a rare insider’s view of the small courts in Catholic south Germany, Austria, and Bavaria. Full of sharp observations of prelates and princes, the autobiography also records episodes of the extraordinary cruelty for which the German princely courts were notorious. Joseph Fröhlich, court fool in Dresden, presents more appealing facets of foolery. A sharp salesman and hero of the Meissen factories, he was deeply attached to the folk life of fooling. The book ends by tying the growth of Enlightenment skepticism to the demise of court foolery around 1800.

Outram’s book is invaluable for giving us such a vivid depiction of the court fool and especially for revealing how this figure can shed new light on the wielding of power in Enlightenment Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780813942025

Book preview

Four Fools in the Age of Reason

Studies in Early Modern German History

H. C. Erik Midelfort, Editor

Dorinda Outram

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Four Fools in the Age of Reason

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Laughter, Cruelty, and Power in Early Modern Germany

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2019 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2019

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Names: Outram, Dorinda, author.

Title: Four fools in the age of reason : laughter, cruelty, and power in early modern Germany / Dorinda Outram.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2019. | Series: Studies in early modern German history | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018046953 | ISBN 9780813942018 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813942025 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Fools and jesters—German—History—18th century. | Germany—Court and courtiers—History—18th century. | Germany—Court and courtiers—Biography. | Gundling, Jacob Paul, Freiherr von, 1673–1731. | Morgenstern, Salomon Jakob, 1706–1785. | Fröhlich, Joseph, 1694–1757. | Prosch, Peter, 1744–1804. | Germany—Social life and customs—18th century.

Classification: LCC GT3670.5.G4 O87 2019 | DDC 792.702/809—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046953

Cover art: Fool’s Cap Map of the World. (Ashmolean Museum)

You have to find a way to put the extremes together, not necessarily by diminishing the extremity of each one, but to form the art of transition. . . . You have to keep the extremes but find the link, always find the link, so that there is an organic whole.

—Daniel Barenboim to Edward Said, 2004

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Numerus Stultorum Infinitus Est

ONE Jacob Paul Gundling: The Honor of Historians and Fools

TWO Salomon Jacob Morgenstern: Newspapers, Professors, and Playing the Fool

THREE Joseph Fröhlich: Of Owls and Other Animals

FOUR Peter Prosch: The Last Court Fool

FIVE Two Deaths: The Hanswurst and the Fool

Conclusion: The End of the Journey

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Individual authorship is a polite fantasy. Many people have contributed to the making of this book over a long period of time, often more than they were aware of. First of all must come Martin Gierl, who would not let me dedicate this book to him. Without him this book would not exist. It was he who read an earlier version of chapter 1 and told me I had not an article but a book. His steadfast support sustained through difficult times. The hospitality that he and Michaela Hohkamp extended in Berlin and Göttingen did much to reassure me of the joys of writing, reading, and simply talking history. I would also like to acknowledge the support given to this project by H. C. Erik Midelfort, who accepted a letter and a packet of typescript nearly out of the blue, and by Beth Plummer, who advised me to send the letter and the packet. Bill Bell, Ritchie Robertson, and Jürgen Schlumbohm sustained my spirits, and, last but not least, Hans Bödeker provided, at a difficult time, constant intellectual stimulation, mixed with kindness and humor. Anthony LaVopa asked questions. Answering them greatly improved this book.

It is rare to express fondness for an institution, but I will do so now: the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel showed itself a wise, kind, and humane institution in its daily dealings with scholars, and on special occasions that I will not detail here. Its magnificent holdings were a constant support and delight during a project that often required obscure materials. Jill Bepler, leader of the Fellowship program at the library, maintains an extraordinary mixture of moral sensibility and practical efficaciousness. Frau Gerlinde Strauss dealt with the numerous problems that arose during my two stays at the library in 2015 and 2014 with efficiency moderated with Schwung. The reading room of the library became a home away from home, and it was there that I began to understand something of the life of fools. And historians.

At the Lichtenberg-Kolleg of the University of Göttingen, I was given four uninterrupted months in the fall and winter of 2016 to put the finishing touches to this book. Whether this confidence was well placed is for the reader to judge. Martin van Gelderen and Dominik Hünniger’s leadership in both practical and intellectual matters is a treat to behold. Seminars and reading groups create an intellectual community. In spite of Göttingen’s weather, many friendships were formed here

At the Staatliches Museum in Dresden, which contains the so-called Grünes Gewolbe, I was astounded by the generosity of curator Dirk Weber, who offered to show me the two extraordinary figures of Joseph Fröhlich that are reproduced in these pages and to do so at a time when the museum was closed to the general public.

I would also like to thank my Department Chair, Professor Matthew Lenoe, for supporting my requests for leave in 2015 and 2016, and the University of Rochester for granting them.

Four Fools in the Age of Reason

Introduction

Numerus Stultorum Infinitus Est

The fool does not necessarily inhabit a beautiful or romantic world.

—Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (1935)

This is a book about fools in the Age of Reason, that time running from the end of the seventeenth century to the French Revolution, which began in 1789. It is mostly concerned with fools and fooling at princely courts in Austria and the German states, with sidelights on England, France, and Russia. It tries to understand the nature of these courts through a reconceptualization of fooling, and it puts that fooling against some of the central concerns of the Enlightenment. It examines the life of four famous fools—Peter Prosch (1744–1804), Salomon Jacob Morgenstern (1708–1785), Joseph Fröhlich (1694–1757), and Jacob Paul Gundling (1673–1731), as case studies of the way humor—often black humor—was used as a way of making human community, controlling human waywardness, and strengthening power. Cruelty and the exploitation of the weak by the strong were integral to this humor and will give rise to some difficult moments for readers. This book also carries along with it some thoughts sparked by the writing of history in general, and of a book about fools in particular. It ends with the story of how I, as a fool, came to write this book about fools, a story that contains both cruelty and joy.

This is the first time that these four fools have been studied together, and rescued, I hope, from their half-lives as literary and historical curiosities. It is also the first time that their lives as fools have been examined in the context of Enlightenment, court, and power. Their discoveries about the Enlightenment form the fabric of this book.

Even that most gloomy book of the Bible, Ecclesiastes, reassures us, first of all, that the number of fools is infinite (1:15). I am therefore a fool (doubly, for it is also true that anyone who writes about fools must be a fool too), and you too are a fool, dear reader. This book enrolls us all in the company of the foolish, and allows us, as fools in the present, to understand other fools in the past. I make no apology for enrolling myself as a character in this book.

In what voice will we speak about our discoveries? Surely, a quiet one. For this will not be a history built around controversies, where historians lose their tempers, raise their voices, and parade their expertise until it almost dies on a forced march.¹ It will also, on the other hand, not make claims, even in a quiet voice, to detached clarity. Historians have often presumed that we can see the past more clearly, can look down upon the fair field of folk, when at a distance, and that distance is a prerequisite for the writing of history.² I do not believe that. It is a statement that smacks of hubris. How can any human creature lay claim to detachment?

What are we studying when we study the history of fools and foolishness? We are studying the lives and work of experts in foolishness, professional entertainers who were by turns buffoons, jesters, and poets, who worked using a combination of crude physical humor and pointed repartee, at large and small courts all over Germany, from the end of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century. These were not the creatures dressed in cap and bells of the medieval and Renaissance periods. They were not the Fool in King Lear. Yet they were still called fools and called themselves fools and had some of the functions of fools, such as giving counsel to rulers.

Laughter was their weapon and tool. Yet as I worked on this book it became clear to me that although laughter was what fools elicited, and what they wielded, fools were, on another level, embodiments: embodiments of contradiction. They were, often in the same person, humble and companions of princes, foolish and wise, buffoons and poets, public and private, archaic and modern, scholars and practical jokers, honored and dishonored. These contradictions stand at the stress points in the culture at large, stress points about the definition of status and the meaning of power. This is the historical value of studying fools. We learn about the pleasures and dangers of laughter in a way that is sobering because laughter is not simple. The pleasures and dangers of laughter are also the pleasures and dangers of power.

Or: do we have perhaps to undergo a rebuke to foolishness and face the fact that we might be studying what the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) called the rubbish-heap of history³—in other words, the things that no one else thinks worthwhile to study: the jokes that can no longer be understood, the crafts that are no longer practiced, and the roles that are no longer played? For we have to account for the fact that especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, few if any professional historians have occupied themselves with fools. Perhaps the role of fool seems so utterly over and done with that it is not even quaint anymore and seems to be without legacy for the present. It may be that not only is the particular humor of fooling incomprehensible to us now but that it is embedded in now lost relationships of power and emotion. Or it may be that the story of fooling has simply been written out.

Yet other historians have picked over other rubbish heaps. History written from the perspective of the New Historicism movement of the 1980s, in books such as Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre, Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, and Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare are distant from the big history of wars, price curves, the conquest of continents, and the making of scientific revolutions. They speak instead of peasants and apprentices, struggles over land, the inner workings of marriage, manners, mistaken identity, and cruel rituals involving cats. New Historicism would seem ideally suited for the study of fools. So why has this not happened? Why has no recent historian (except this fool) pulled a fool from historical oblivion?

What follows in answer to this question is speculation. First, fools probably seem more distant from us than do peasants and apprentices, each of whom have modern representatives. Fools, on the other hand, are surely a dead end, surely the very type of Abfall. No one is a fool now as these fools were, and no amount of drawing parallels between historical fools, who had the ruler and his court as audience, and television satirists, who have a mass public as theirs, will alter this fact. Studying fools perhaps also seems unlikely to help the historian draw a moral for the present or fulfill any sort of critical function. This is one challenge. It is also not surprising that no historian now wants to get close to that obscure, palpitating, nexus between humility and power that was the life of the fool. The study of the fool, as history writing swings back toward the grand narrative, seems to be so remote, so specialized, so over, as to be unlikely to illuminate the great patterns. (This, however, says something about the way in which professional historians designate something as specialized, when in fact there is no topic that does not illuminate some other one.) And, surely most important, historians have feared the contamination of foolishness. She who writes about fools must surely be one. For all these reasons, historians have been loath to be identified with the study of the Abfall that is the fool and foolishness. It is also the case that our culture sits atop many suppressed narratives, histories that have not merely been written out of the record but for which there is now no human personality or group ready and able to receive them. It is the objective of this book to show that the study of the fool is the study not of the rubbish heap of history but of the gold mine of contradiction.

Fool’s Cap Map of the World. Dating from the 1590s, the map shows the traditional attributes of the fool: cap, bells, and mirror. The picture also shows Latin mottos, such as Nosce te ipsum (Know thyself) and Numerus stultorum infinitus est (The number of fools is infinite). (Ashmolean Museum)

Fools and fooling attracted their first historians in the very age of their disappearance, just as the field notes of the anthropologist mark the end of the authentic life of the tribe. The great Geschichte der Hofnarren (History of court fools) was written by Karl Friedrich Flögel (1729–1788) and posthumously published in 1789, a year that has often been designated as the opening of the modern era.⁴ This 510-page work of mingled heroic compilation, humane analysis, and vivid writing not only resumes most other contemporary writing about fools but also covers fools from most countries and all eras. It can reasonably be said to have influenced every subsequent history of fools and fooling, including this one. (Flögel does not write about any fool still living in 1789, a pity since one of the great fools, Peter Prosch (see chapter 4), was then still alive and working). So influential was Flögel’s work that new, updated and enlarged editions were published in the nineteenth century, and one as late as 1914. Flögel’s work even influenced the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). In this century, there is even a paperback edition.

Flögel’s interests were not confined to fools but ranged widely within the realm of the comic. Geschichte der Hofnarren, however, has stayed in print longer than any of the other works that Flögel conceived as its companions.⁵ It is worth noting that Flögel was writing during the Enlightenment, an age deeply concerned with the construction of a science of man, the encyclopedic bringing together of all knowledge about mankind. He may well have seen the mapping of humor as part of that construction, and the ability to laugh as part of the human spirit.

Who was Flögel? Biographical details are hard to discover. But we know that he was born in the small Silesian market town of Jauer in eastern Germany in 1729, went through the ravages of First Silesian War, and died in 1788 in the larger Silesian town of Liegnitz. As a small child, he was fascinated by the municipal fool in Jauer. He acquired more formal education at the Maria-Magdalena Gymnasium in the provincial capital at Breslau, and later at the University of Halle, where he read theology with the famous scholar Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten (1706–1757). From 1761 he taught in the Maria-Magdalena Gymnasium, becoming its prorector. In 1766, he published a German translation of Alexander Gerard’s Enquiry into Taste. In 1773 he became superintendent of schools for his birthplace and in the following year was appointed as professor of philosophy at the Ritterakademie zu Liegnitz, an institution founded by Frederick William I of Prussia as a university for the aristocracy.

Flögel’s life looks like that of a more successful than average provincial intellectual. He was clearly not a man to have used words without attending to their meaning. So what does he mean by calling the book for which he is best known a history (Geschichte)? Flögel was someone well aware of the past. He believed that the past was different from the present. In his Geschichte der komischen Litteratur (1784), he wrote that every writer carries the sign of their time on their forehead.⁶ Yet at the end of the eighteenth century, the terms to describe writing about the past were still in flux. It was long time, for example, before Johann Heinrich Zedler’s authoritative Universal-Lexikon replaced the term Historie with Geschichte, and by 1775 Johann Christoph Adelung’s Wörterbuch was still having to argue that history was true, that is, not fabricated, and that it could form a coherent whole.⁷

Let us turn to the influential writings on history of Flögel’s Halle teacher Baumgarten to find where the meaning of history was being worked out.⁸ Baumgarten (1706–1757) had argued, against the Halle philosopher Christian Wolff, that the same methods were to be applied to sacred and to secular history; and that history could produce certain knowledge—an important argument when presuppositions about history’s lack of certainty drove much of the contemporary critique against it. In other words, in Baumgarten’s account, history could be worth writing.

Coherence was important. History to Baumgarten was not a dry recitation of facts or events but rather a comprehensible and lively presentation formed by an appropriate narrative coherence. Such an account was innately pleasurable because it was in accord with the wise purposes of the creator of human nature. Even the use of anecdotes in history was supported by Baumgarten’s observation that revelation consisted mainly of stories. Baumgarten thought the advantage of biography was that the individual’s life, rather than abstract concepts, provided coherence. Yet coherence also required authenticated evidence. Documents had to be conned with a critical eye for forgery, eyewitness accounts had to be scrutinized for reliability, and the character and number of witnesses ascertained. Later reports had to be compared with earlier ones. The above phrases could stand in as a description of the methodology of the Geschichte der Hofnarren. Flögel wrote mightily as a historian and used stories or anecdotes throughout his work, all of which were gathered around individuals who provided coherence to his account of the history of court fools in all times and (most) places.

Baumgarten’s work on history had grown more urgent around the time that Flögel was his student. He knew that Deists and freethinkers had made history their most effective weapon against Christianity. He was convinced that freethinking and atheism could be dispelled by systematic historical knowledge. Knowledge of history was salutary to belief, providing proof of revelation and providence. From the late 1730s, Baumgarten recognized history as an alternative form of authority capable of raising questions about dogma, or, for that matter, the received interpretation of Scripture. He thus dismantled the barrier between history and dogma to fashion a moderate version of history that relativized neither revelation nor belief.

Critical history was thus foundational for true Protestant belief. And it could also be pressed into the service of the fools’ history. Baumgarten’s own writings showed abundant information on the practices, customs, sciences, and agriculture of peoples around the world in the same way that Flögel’s book looked at the history and practices of fools and foolishness in many diverse peoples. In turn, this